Hello, long-neglected readers! I have a treat for you today: an interview with a fellow-author in a recently released erotica anthology. The anthology is called Forbidden Fruit: Stories of Unwise Lesbian Desire, edited by Cheyenne Blue, and the author is Lisabet Sarai. Her story in the anthology is called “The First Stone.”

LS: Oy! What makes you think that I have written anything that is not erotic?

Seriously, pretty much every story I’ve created as an adult has at least an undertone of sexual tension. What can I say? That’s just what interests and inspires me. You’re right about my sampling many genres. I’ve written erotic suspense, erotic humor, erotic historical, erotic steampunk, erotic paranormal, erotic multi-cultural and erotic science fiction – but that E-word is always in there.

Perhaps the closest I’ve come to a mainstream story is “Vegas” (available free at http://www.lisabetsarai.com/vegas.html), about the relationship between a female trucker and her black-sheep-of-the-family aunt. That tale doesn’t have any overt sex in it. However, it still has some erotic themes (not lesbian, I should add).

My husband keeps telling me I should switch to writing mysteries. Certainly that would be more respectable. In all honesty, though, I’m not sure I would succeed in keeping the erotic element out of any genre of fiction I attempted.

What is the particular draw of erotica? Nothing, in my opinion, gets so much to the heart of who we are. For me, sexuality and identity are inextricably entwined. I led a rather adventurous sex life in my twenties and thirties. Those experiences have shaped not only the way I relate to people but my views on morality and on spirituality.

Plus I’ll admit that I sometimes enjoy the shock value. It’s very liberating to shine the light of my fiction on topics so many individuals feel deserve to be relegated to darkness.

LS: I think I was born a traveler. When I was about eighteen months old, my parents flew with me and my infant brother from the mid west where my dad had been working to the east coast where he and my mom had both grown up. According to family apocrypha, I spent the next twenty four hours announcing to anyone who would listen “I just flew on American Airlines!”

A confirmed bookworm, I spend my elementary and high school years reading about ancient times and faraway places. I used to fantasize about taking the train to New York City and staying in a hotel there. I could scarcely imagine something more exciting.

I didn’t actually get the chance to travel abroad until the end of college. My best friend and I skipped our graduation ceremony in order to spend five eye-opening weeks in Spain and Morocco. Ten years later, my husband-to-be seduced me with his backpacker tales of wandering in Turkey and Indonesia.

LS: I’ve been playing for a while with the idea of a BDSM erotic romance in which the mysterious hero – the Dom – turns out to be quadriplegic. My point, of course, is that desire, especially the sort involved in power exchange, is fundamentally a non-physical phenomenon. I’ve gone so far as to write the first chapter, but I’m really not sure I have the skill to continue. There are so many traps to avoid, so many groups I might turn off or anger – from those who’d accuse me of being politically incorrect or of exploiting the notion of disability, to those who’d be squeaked by what seems like the opposite of a happy ending.

LS: Religion – at least most monotheistic Western religion – is pretty hostile to sexuality. However, I believe that the sexual and the spiritual are closely intertwined. Sexual energy ultimately represents our creative, generative power as human beings. Furthermore (as some eastern religions recognize), sexual acts can connect souls as well as bodies.

In some sense, denying one’s sexual self, as a celibate nun does, could be considered as denying her humanity. Even as a sort of insult to the Deity, depending on how you conceptualize the concept of a Higher Power. I understand the Christian argument that erotic desire can serve as a distraction from contemplating the spiritual plane, but I’ve always felt that doctrine held a fundamental paradox. According to Genesis, God made man and woman and “saw that it was good”. Who are we to say the the body is unworthy, arising as it does from the same creative power as the soul?

This topic is one dear to my heart. I could write tomes. So I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

LS: Helpless love for a celibate priest is a long-established romantic trope. Remember The Thorn Birds? It’s hard to imagine a lover more forbidden that a Catholic priest (unless one is willing to consider incest). When Cheyenne told me about her theme, I almost immediately thought about a story featuring a nun (much less well-trodden ground, from a fictional perspective). And who would want her? What sort of person would have the greatest social and emotional distance? A prostitute would do nicely, especially given the New Testament stories of Jesus being criticized for fraternizing with whores and money changers.

A homeless prostitute, recovering from drug addiction, resident at a women’s shelter, where the nun worked performing service for those less fortunate… it was all taking shape quite well, when my imagination suffered a tectonic shift. What if, instead of telling the story from the prostitute’s perspective, I made the nun the narrator? A nun attracted to a prostitute – doubly forbidden, not only because of her vows of celibacy but also because of the taboo nature of Sapphic attraction.

At that point, the story practically wrote itself. I had that wonderful sense of confidence that we writers so rarely achieve – the sense that I’d really gotten it right.

But of course sometimes we delude ourselves. Only the readers can judge.

***

“Heard you were married once, Sister. That true?”

Oh, God! “Um – yes. More than ten years ago.”

“So you ain’t no virgin.”

Startled, I looked up from the meat loaves. Heat shimmered through me. Despite her tone of levity, she was not smiling. The knowledge I saw in her eyes scared me.

“No – Tony and I – we -” I choked on my own words as tears gathered.

“You can tell me, Sister.”

It poured out of me before I could stop myself, the whole sordid story. The fairy tale wedding of Kathy Gallagher and her high school sweetheart Anthony Manzetti, with both enormous families in attendance. The all-too-brief flare of passion. Then Tony’s cancer, diagnosed on our second anniversary, and the years of treatment: chemo, radiation, surgery, more chemo. Remissions and the rekindling of hope. Relapses and despair. I’d cared for him through it all: the sweats and the vomiting, the rashes and the sores, the terrible, terrible pain. Everyone praised my strength and courage. A saint, they’d called me.

Two days after his funeral, I’d slit my wrists.

I’d awakened in St. Margaret’s Hospital, bandaged and restrained. An elderly nun sat by my bedside, stern and sorrowful. The weight of memory crushed me.

“Why did you save me?” I’d asked, so weak I could barely whisper. “You should have let me die.”

“For shame, child. Your life is a gift from God. How dare you throw it away, when you could be using it to help others?”

“Haven’t I done enough, taking care of Tony all those years?”

“Apparently not, since your soul is not at peace.”

I shuddered at the recollection. Scalding tears streamed down my cheeks. Magnolia slipped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me against her pillowy chest. Lost in grief and self-pity, I scarcely noticed, at least for a moment.

She stroked my cropped hair. “Poor baby. Seems to me that becoming a nun yourself – well that was a bit much, wasn’t it?” A sense of comfort stole over me. Her floral aroma mingled with the kitchen spices. “Maybe you chose wrong.”

She pressed her lips to my forehead. Terror and arousal streaked through me in alternating waves. I struggled against her entangling arms. “No, no,” I babbled. “Sin – suicide is a mortal sin – I had to atone…”

Magnolia released me with a deep sigh. “Ain’t you done enough penance, Sister?”

I rushed upstairs to my room without answering, her scent clinging to my clothing, the mark of her lips branded on my forehead.

****

To read more of this story, and all of my story, “Our Woman,” and a bunch of other terrific stories, check out the anthology. Details below!

Leave a comment on any post in the Forbidden Fruit blog tour to be entered into a random draw to win one of these great prizes. Prizes include a paperback copy of Girls Who Score, lesbian sports erotica edited by Ily Goyanes, Best Lesbian Romance 2011 edited by Radclyffe, anebook of Ladylit’s first lesbian anthology Anything She Wants, and a bundle of three mini-anthologies from Ladylit: Sweat, A Christmas to Remember and Bossy. All of these titles contain some stories written by the fabulous contributors to Forbidden Fruit: stories of unwise lesbian desire. You must include an email address in your comment to be entered into the draw.

LAUNCH SPECIAL PRICE ONLY FROM AMAZON: for one week only, 5 – 11 September 2014, purchase Forbidden Fruit: stories of unwise lesbian desire for the super-special price of 0.99c.

This post is supposed to be about the really exciting poetry anthology that was just released, in which I have three poems. And it will be. But not in any kind of straight line. We have a bit of a tangle to get through first.

It’s time to start teaching again soon. I’ve been working on my syllabus (in fact, I should be working on my syllabus right now), making sure that my calendar is in order, and generally preparing.

It hasn’t been an easy summer. I had such clear plans for myself this summer, and had begun to get into their rhythm, when both of my parents got serious, frightening health news within a few weeks of each other. My dad has Parkinson’s disease, and my mom, breast cancer.

My dad is on some medication that seems to be helping a lot, and my mom has since had surgery and is recovering very well and rapidly. Both diseases are in early stages, and, at least for the present, things look like they are going to be ok for both of them. But still. The experience sent me for a spin, in so many ways.

When I was little, I used to deal with the idea of death, and my parents’ death in particular, by deciding the only way death would be acceptable to me was if I lived to be very old and my parents lived to be extraordinarily old, and we all died on the same day.

Much has changed since then. My parents are no longer together, and I don’t live with either of them anyway. I don’t know, if such an odd situation as I described above came about, if it would be particularly soothing to me. Charlotte and I were at the beach recently with her family, and there was a piece of art on the wall in the master bedroom that said something like, if you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live a day without you. We both agreed that this sentiment seemed a bit odd to us: are you wishing your partner to have a sad last day of life, since you just died? Isn’t it a little creepy to quantify your love and decide who gets to die first based on that? But death, disease, and vulnerability of those I love, of myself, and of my parents, particularly, whose strength of body I have counted on without even knowing I was doing it, and whose vulnerabilities seem to point in a direct but unreadable line to my waiting, seemingly so healthy flesh– which I know so intimately and yet whose significant eventual weaknesses I do not, cannot know– well, these things still have the power to stymy me completely, to leave me dizzy and disoriented in a landscape of being for which I have no map.

One thing that kept happening, in the maelstrom of my reaction to all this, was that I would think with surprising dread about the school year coming up. “Why am I doing this?” I thought, meaning the program I am in, the classes I will teach, all of it, I guess. “Does it matter to anyone?” It just seemed, I have to tell you, like a lot of stress and work that might not actually be important things to do–for me, or for anybody.

So… I didn’t quit, or anything. I traveled to see my parents. I traveled to see my friends. I read a bunch: some my disciplined school reading, which I clung to despite my (hopefully temporary) inability to do the kind of organizational work I need at this stage of the game, and some just for desire’s sake– my old childhood standbys, a book for a book club, new books by fiercely loved authors. Finally, I began to work on my syllabus for this coming semester. Ideas for how to structure my teaching popped into my head on the subway and receded as soon as I was in front of the computer. I wrestled. I played. I counted out days– enough time between one assignment and the next? Too much?

When I visited my mom before her surgery, I kept trying to get her to drink more water to prepare for the dehydration that would result. I’ve always been a thirsty person, so I felt this was an example I could easily set, something I actually understood in the wilds of surgical language, paperwork, preparation. “It’s a skill I have,” I said, a bit facetiously, as we walked into my grandmother’s apartment building. “Being a pain in the neck?” my mom quipped. “Well, I’ve had a good role model,” I replied, and we laughed and laughed, something in the easy teasing breaking through the fear and tension that were pressing in otherwise. Later, I heard her talking on the phone about reality TV, making the exact same complaints I had made in a separate phone call, one she had not heard, to Charlotte. I thought about apples and trees.

When I visited my dad, we went out for dinner and he told me that he is coming to realize that he is not his brain, that the threat to his brain does not have to be a mortal threat to him, himself, in the reality of himself. He doesn’t know exactly what that means yet, but he believes it. And I believe him. He has promised that the cracking of everything you thought you know does not have to be the end of growth or wisdom. And I believe him. He got a big dessert and enjoyed every bite, and then he got lost looking for where we were going next, second guessing himself and wandering too far. I thought about apples and trees some more.

I have not fallen far, in many ways. I am so far, in others. I am not far in ways I cannot see, ways that are beyond the potential of body to fail, to suffer, to falter, ways that are about the spirit and the mind and the things that make me laugh.

So I came back from this, and I came back to my syllabus. (I know– we keep lurching back and forth, but this is how it has felt, so disjointed and everything so pressing). I was going through the mountains of paper my previous students had left me, and I found their words evaluating the course for me, bright, slippery, coated in salt and spice and drips of honey. One said a story we read pulled him in “like a fish.” One said she knew that one paper she wrote was her best, even though she didn’t get her best grade on it. Many said they loved our discussions best, getting to talk about things that mattered to them. I loved our discussions best, too. I always do. One said he fell asleep in them sometimes because they were boring, but admitted that maybe this would have improved if he had said something himself. They lied to me, I’m sure, occasionally, but they also told the truth. And the truth, in the balance, was that it seemed like we’d done something worth doing. That it was better, for at least a handful of them, to have taken this course than it would have been if they had not taken it.

I began to get excited about teaching again.

We lurch through these semesters, while our outside lives fray and tatter and come together and fall apart. We do it together. I think it’s hard to understand how fully we do it together, until you have been on both sides of the classroom, slipping the mantle of anxious authority on and off your shoulders, hoping for magic, for alchemy, for honesty, for connection, for five minutes together in which you all seem to want to be there, in which everyone is learning, although it’s rarely whatever the lesson plan had laid out for the day.

So there’s this anthology, and it’s full of all queer-teacher-poets, talking about teaching and queerness. And the premise, I think, is that what we say as queer teachers is significant precisely because of our identities, of the way we are situated in the world, even if we are not talking about sexuality at all. And the premise is also that teaching is something worth singing about, worth twisting words into beauty about. Worth the time it takes to do, and also worth the time it takes to write and read about.

And I realize, writing this, that this woven-together feeling that the book values and emphasizes, the idea that my queerness matters to my teaching and my teaching to my queerness, even if they seem separate– this is why I couldn’t just write a post that said, hey, y’all, I’m in a book! Or even something that was just about teaching and/or queerness, but rather I had to talk to you about what has really been going on.

I think in some ways that’s what this book celebrates. The “really” about all of us, and the way it may feel like a detraction, something that takes us away from the work we should be doing, something that distracts– when honestly, it is what makes us teachers. The “really” of our lives, beautiful, ugly, wicked, confusing, secret, thrilling– that’s the magic word. That’s what erupts in the classroom, every now and then, in the middle of the plodding and the oversleeping and the where-the-hell-is-the-worksheet-I-printed-out and the oh-the-paper-is-due-TODAY?, and suddenly we are somewhere holy. Suddenly we are somewhere true.

It’s been such a while since I posted anything here that I actually have tons to post! And, of course, not very much time to do it in. But I figured I will give you an overview now, and then, over the next few days, hopefully actually say something substantive about each of these things.

First of all, Word Up, the amazing community bookshop I’ve blogged about before, needs help. We lost our space in August and are having a huge fundraising campaign to reopen, and, not incidentally, there’s a dance video in which I (and many others) dance to show our love for Word Up. Word up is supremely important to my neighborhood, and the concept of Word Up, a community space dedicated to books, art, music, theater, and education and performance of all kinds, is supremely important everywhere. I hope you’ll watch the video, because it is super amazing, and check out the campaign and throw some love, money, reblogging and tagging, etc. our way. We have a long way to go, and every little bit counts. //www.indiegogo.com/wordupbooks

Secondly, my story “Woman-Time” is included in The Best Lesbian Erotica of 2013, edited by Kathleen Warnock and Jewelle Gomez. My story has magic in it. The real kind, as well as the sexy kind. You can get it here:http://www.cleispress.com/book_page.php?book_id=503 or at your local queer-and-small-press-friendly bookstore. I know here in NYC you usually get it at Bluestockings: http://bluestockings.com/. Also, I will be reading from this story at the KBG bar in NYC on December 20th! Please come! I would love to see friends both known and as yet unknown there. Here’s more info on that:

Drunken! Careening! Writers!

Best! Lesbian! Erotica! 2013!

Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Sid March

…and special surprise guests!

with your hostess, Kathleen Warnock

Thursday, Dec. 20, 7pm

KGB Bar, 85 E 4th St., NYC

FREE

Finally, my poem “Telling My Beads” was published in The Other Journal as part of their Prayer issue, and you can read it right here: http://theotherjournal.com/2012/11/29/telling-my-beads/ It’s based on a true story, and includes a rainbow rosary. Also, if you like, I will read it to you– there’s an audio file on the top of the page, and that’s me reading the poem.

So: community book & art spaces, sexy stories, and poems about prayer. That is a good summary of some important aspects of my life, and certainly my writing life! I hope you check them out, and I hope to write something more substantive about each of those things in the coming days.

I just got a pdf today of the NY________ magazine’s third issue, which contains my poem, “Gloria Mundi.” The magazine (it’s pronounced “New York Underscore,” if you’re not sure that’s going on with the title), features writing about living in New York City, and each issue is organized around a theme. The theme of this issue is dating. My poem is about dating, clearly, and about public transportation, since you can’t really have one without the other in New York City.

I mean, I guess you can, if you live really close by to the person you’re dating or like driving around New York or are super rich and don’t take the subway– but I always thinking living in New York City and not taking the subway (presuming you can, physically, take the subway) is sort of bad sportsmanship.

I have lots of feelings about the subway, which is partially why my poem contains subway trains. It’s a funny, happy poem! I hope it makes you smile, if you read it, which you can do by buying the magazine.

The magazine, by the way, is spiffy. I was impressed with my pdf copy that I just received. It’s really pretty and well-designed. I think you will like it, if you try it. There might even be a picture in it of a man tied up with neckties. In a sort of artful way. Just in case a poem by me that will probably make you smile (I don’t want to promise, then I will have angry, non-smiling people writing comments here) is not enough incentive.

Here’s the magazine’s website: http://ny-underscore.com/about.html, where you can find info about where to buy the magazine in New York City. I recommend that you go to Bluestockings, because you will find 12,000 other books there that you want to buy, if you are me or anything like me. Probably that would happen at Book Thug Nation, too, I just haven’t been there. Once Word Up gets up and running again, I will see if we can get copies of it too! (Now people who only know me through this blog and have been paying attention to old posts are wondering what the heck happened to Word Up. I should write a post about that soon).

I wrote this today during the composition class I teach. The exercise was to tell the story of your morning, from when you got up to now. Naturally, I ran out of time. But I thought I’d share what I wrote, since I haven’t written here in so long. No editing, no additions, though there’s more to the story and I dearly want to continue–but–in the spirit of the assignment– hot off the presses:

I can’t believe it’s time to get up. It’s both too early and too late. Too early because I’m so tired and too late because I’m still marking these essays. I meant to get up earlier–or maybe stay up later–but now it’s just time to go. It’s chilly, so I’ll need warmer clothes–do I even have warmer teaching clothes clean? It was so hot this summer, I thought it would be that hot forever.

I find clothes and get out the door. My metro card has run out of money. It seemed to go on beyond the 30 days before, and I was secretly hoping that it was magic and would never run out again. That turns out to be a false hope. The turnstiles–well, the part that reads the cards–at my stop are dying some kind of slow death, and everyone just stands there swiping and swiping, hoping to get lucky and get in, which most of us finally do.

On the train, I focus on this one man sitting down. He’s a tall white guy with a tattoo on his face–wearing camo pants and with a huge camo bag in front of him. The tattoo makes wandering lines all across his nose and forehead–a mountain range, a bird, an insect? No idea. He seems out of it, staring a little, eyelids fluttering from time to time. I am imagining dangers inside his bag, and I don’t like myself doing that. When he gets off, I see he has had a large dog with him the whole time–where was it? How did I not notice?

At my stop, it’s already warmer than it was before. I head towards John Jay, thinking about class and what I will write in this assignment. The bells at St. Paul’s are ringing. I look at my watch, surprised. It’s not yet 9 AM– why are the bells ringing? Then I know why, and I stop on the sidewalk. I put my hand to my chest, over my necklace. I feel warm now. I keep walking.

The prompt for the blogging challenge for today (or yesterday? Day 3, and my 2nd post, at any rate) is about writers we admire, and writing mentors.

It feels like a litany of saints, eh?

I admire brave writers. Writers who write about things that are difficult to say, or to say well, or who construct stories in ways that allow a deep and startling engagement with their intricate subjects. Especially, I admire writers who are morally brave, who dare and struggle to reveal what is true about our experiences of the world and our choices in it. I’m thinking of Patrick Ness here, and his brilliant Chaos Walking series, of Yann Martel, Hannah Green, the memoir I literally just finished by Margaux Fragoso, of Markus Zuzak, of Toni Morrison, always, of Louise Erdrich, of so many more.

I admire writers whose stories and characters are so alive that the books themselves feel like precious friends, or whose words and worlds have become the backdrop of the world I actually live in, always present, always ready, whole phrases there in my mind when I look at something from the corner of my eye, in the right light, in the right frame of mind. Tomson Highway for Kiss of the Fur Queen; Elizabeth E. Wein, especially The Winter Prince; always, always, the first and beloved C.S. Lewis and L. M. Montgomery, whose writing literally helped me both recognize and construct a self to sit and write to you today… which brings me to the authors who taught and loved and maddened me from the earlier reading days: Madeleine L’Engle. Cynthia Voight. Authors whose names I can’t remember, of books like The Only Alien on the Planet.

And the teachers of sex and adulthood like a glittering mirror ball with a thousand facets, they who help my sharpness, my desire, my wide-open eyes: Anne Rice, Armistead Maupin, Colleen McCullough, and, in his own way, Andrew Greeley.

This is impossible, every name leads to another, every thought or category to ten more who fit and break it.

The beautiful and blazingly intelligent William Shakespeare (I know, I’m not the first nor the last to love that one, but one of my first writerly ambitions was to have a vocabulary as large as his). John Donne who melts me, Julian of Norwich who shores me up. Those who have left their giant thumbprints on the details of my life, on my experiences and my relationships. Little Willy Wycherly. Diane Duane.

I admire writers who tend their writing like eggs in a nest, like thin-skinned infants, like centuries-old trees. I admire so very many writers beyond this strange and idiosyncratic list that I could post on nothing else for the month and not be done.

I admire writers who are missing from my mind and from this list because I have never read them, because nobody has ever read them, or very few, but who keep writing anyway. I admire Felix Gilman, who gave me his very excellent, intricate, beautiful book The Thunderer for free in a line at the New York City Comic Convention a couple of years ago, just an assembly line of signed books– it must have felt strange, perhaps discouraging, but I read what he writes now, and urge others to do the same. I admire… oh, everyone! The researchers, the ones who make me feel the whole spread and weight of their research like so many pounds of feathers, the intensely intelligent: Umberto Eco, Barry Unsworth… the comic artists who spread the world under my fingers– Craig Thompson, Fumi Yoshinaga…

OH, THERE ARE SO MANY.

Not to mention the writers I actually know, the ones who inspire, encourage, and sustain me. The BMVCOE for the conversations that would be epics were they piled up in pages, Charlotte Rahn-Lee for a life-sharing story, Jeff McGraw for every bit of faith, The Uncut Pages Writers’ Group for loving my weird entanglements of invented human beings.

I am still leaving so many out. But after all, this is writing. Writing is always leaving most of the things out, spinning ecstatically next to that which you most want to say, throwing out a hand as you grow dizzy and hoping that the other person will catch enough of the scent on you to understand.

For that, I admire all writers. All with honest hearts and willing fingers.

All the writers I love whom I’ve not mentioned or forgotten, forgive and smile on me still. 🙂

So, I’ve decided to do this Author Blog Challenge to get blogging again, especially now that I’ve finished writing my last paper for the semester, and I saved some good writing news just to get started!

A couple of months ago I found this cool project/website/organization called Underwater New York. What they do is go around to the waterways of New York City and environs, and find all sorts of strange, evocative stuff in and around the water. Then they post about it on their website and people write stories, poems, even songs about the stuff! Seeing that I love strange, evocative stuff, water, making up stories about strange, evocative stuff, and I live in New York City, I was pretty excited and raring to go. They were having a flash fiction call when I found them, and I decided to write about an 1897 pocket watch found near Coney Island.

I noticed that nearly all the stories about the pocket watch had some aspect of it being inherited or at least a special gift, and also that all of them had something to do with death or loss. I guess the pocket watch aspect lends itself to the former, and I wonder if most stories about things being lost in the water related to death or loss. It would be interesting to try to do one that was really jubilant, or something!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and that you check out the rest of Underwater New York, and that you come back throughout the month to see how the blogging challenge is going. I’m not sure what the challenge is, exactly, mostly just to blog and read stuff by other writers, which I’m excited to do.

If you’re stopping by for the first time, welcome! I’m glad you’re here! Please feel free to say hello, and tell me a story about inheritance or pocket watches or Coney Island or finding stuff in the water, or whatever you like.